Helen Yglesias, 92, was novelist, editor

Her stories focused on women's lives

April 9, 2008|The New York Times

NEW YORK — Helen Yglesias, whose novels examined women's lives in an array of settings and situations - small towns, radical urban politics, abusive relationships, illness and old age - died March 28 in Manhattan. She was 92 and had lived in Brooklin, Maine, until several years ago.

She died of natural causes, her daughter, Tamar Cole, said.

Woven through much of Mrs. Yglesias' work is the tension of women juggling the demands of career and family. Although she worked as an editor at The Nation magazine in the late 1960s, Mrs. Yglesias, a mother by then, did not write the first of her five published novels until she was 54.

That first work, How She Died,tells of Mary Moody Schwartz, the daughter of a Communist convicted of spying for the Soviets in the 1930s. Delving into the roots of American radicalism, the story evolves into an account of one woman's struggle with cancer and the disorganized attempts of her family and friends to help her.

Mrs. Yglesias' 1981 book, Sweetsir, is perhaps her best-known work. Set in a small New England town, the book takes its title from the name of the brutish Morgan Sweetsir, who enjoys beating his wives. When he strikes his fifth wife, Sally, once too often, she fatally wards him off with the plunge of a kitchen knife. After a trial she gains her freedom, but the question of liberation is not so simple.

Mrs. Yglesias' other books are Family Feeling; The Saviors; and her last novel, The Girls, about four sisters living out their final years in "God's waiting room," Miami.

Born Helen Bassine on March 29, 1915, Mrs. Yglesias was the youngest of seven children of Solomon and Kate Bassine, Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the Russian-ruled portion of Poland who lived in a cold-water apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Her father owned several grocery stores that failed.